2016 brought about many fundamental changes in the way we work. These changes made our team more effective and our customers more successful. Because we use the available digital marketing tools ourselves, we needed less time and energy for acquisition – time that we were able to use for our customers and the strategic advancement of our services.

In today’s blog article, I would like to take a look at some of the current trends in digital marketing and give you the opportunity to use this for your own marketing moving forward in 2017.

Facebook

For a quite some time, Facebook has no longer been a platform on which high-quality content spreads itself for free. We receive many requests from prospective clients, who say, “Please produce a viral video for me!” Content with advertising messages that spread virally – who doesn’t want that? The reality is that without advertising budgets, viral marketing is more unlikely now than ever. However, the favorable terms of advertising on Facebook have made the distribution of content so attractive that we have invested a significant portion of our own advertising budget and that of our customers to communicate through Facebook and the Facebook subsidiary, Instagram.

I would like to make it clear once again: if you post content on Facebook without paying for the distribution, you hardly reach anybody. However, if you pay for the distribution, you get (even for small amounts) a range that you can only dream of with other media.

You may ask yourself, “Is this also true for my industry?” We had a wide variety of customers for which we created Facebook advertisements last year. Here are some examples:

Facebook’s advertising manager offers a variety of ways to optimize campaigns and reach the right people with your content. It takes some time to explore all the possibilities, but when used correctly it is worth every second invested.

Another tip: More and more, Facebook is working to become the go-to video sharing platform. For this reason, Facebook organically pushes video shares harder than simple text and photo shares. So sharing video can reach more people – for the same money – than a photo, a text or a static graphic. This leads us to our next digital marketing theme: Video.

Video

For us, video is not a new topic: ahafactory.de has emerged from the company ahavideos.com, where we have produced a variety of animated explanatory videos in the last 5 years. In 2016, however, new dynamics came into play on this topic:

High-speed internet

Fast broadband networks cover more and more parts of Germany, Europe and the world. Likewise, the coverage of the mobile network is growing thanks to the clamped LTE network, which makes the viewing of videos on smartphones faster and more comfortable.

Facebook Video

The largest social network particularly takes advantage of this fast mobile network. Videos, which are played directly in the Facebook player, are played remarkably fast. At the same time, Zuckerberg’s company makes the provision of video content extremely attractive via affordable advertising and the streaming service Facebook Live (see above).

YouTube & other video plattforms

In 2016, the largest social network in the video sector, the Google subsidiary YouTube, has made the strategic decision to challenge Netflix in the battle for TV succession. People are expected to open their YouTube-Player for longer periods of time – just as they used to watch TV. This is why YouTube is no longer rewarding the number of views, but the objective duration of video watching. Therefore, longer videos on YouTube have increased in value. For B2B, this is an unpleasant development, because in the business environment, few people would take a lot of time to watch videos. This is just one of the reasons why the importance of other video players (especially in the B2B environment) will increase.

Big Data

The analytical possibilities of high-performance computers and the increasingly better integration in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems and marketing automation tools can be very well used in connection with video. We can now see which groups of people watch which video and up to which point. This allows us to optimize both the videos themselves and their placement. As a result, marketing increasingly becomes a predictable and analytical trade with measurable results – a pleasure for every decision-maker who has to allocate targeted marketing budgets.

Inbound Marketing / Marketing Automating

Inbound marketing has delivered the greatest impact in our marketing toolbox over the last few years. Since 2016, we also offered the integration of automated marketing & sales as a service for our customers. The basic principle behind this is the following: Companies provide high-quality information for potential customers on their blog. In addition to the blog article, deeper knowledge is offered in the form of e-books or other content offerings in exchange against data. For example, if you download an e-book, you will be informed about further content or offers by e-mail. Through automated workflows everyone gets the information that is most interesting to him. A win-win business every step of the way for a couple reasons. First, no one is bored with content that does not interest him or her, and no one is being annoyed with cold calls or blanket email spam. At the same time, the company continually receives inquiries from people who already know that the products and services being offered suit them.